Although die heads for making extruded products are very accurately sized, the actual product that is produced by extrusion through the die heads varies in size. This is due to a number of influencing factors which includes the pressure drop across the die head, expansion of the extruded product as it exits, or after it exits, the die head and variation in take off speed.
When packaging an extruded product containing multiple items, for example a multi-finger confectionery product, the variation in size of the items can be problematic as the packaging equipment needs to be able to deal with a range of sizes from the narrowest and shortest to the widest and longest product that is produced. This is compounded in a twin item product as a tolerance stack for the two individual items occurs, increasing the overall tolerance band. Furthermore an additional tolerance stack is introduced due to the tolerance band of the placement of the two products adjacent one another before packaging.
When producing known twin portion products, the efficiency of the manufacturing process is not optimised. Each portion of the twin portion product is approximately 50% of the total packaged weight as they are packed in pairs. The effect of this is the output through a die head for producing a single portion of a twin portion product is effectively half that of the output through a die head for producing a single portion product having a weight equal to the total weight of the two portion product. This can therefore reduce plant throughput by 50%.
Furthermore when manufacturing a known twin portion product further additional complexity, and associated costs are incurred in the process as additional machinery is required for collating the two portions for packaging.
The overall effect of the above is that the process of producing extruded twin portion products, and the process of packaging these together in a single packaging, is difficult and costly.
The problems set out above are further exacerbated when 3, 4 or more items or portions are present in the product.